There is a page about another good child--little Gordon. Little Gordon 'came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anaesthetics.'
He was a 'demonstration.' A painless one; therefore his coming evoked 'joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science.'
It is a noticeable feature of this literature--the so frequent linking together of the Two Beings in an equal bond; also of Their Two Bibles.
When little Gordon was two years old, 'he was playing horse on the bed, where I had left my "little book." I noticed him stop in his play, take the book carefully in his little hands, kiss it softly, then look about for the highest place of safety his arms could reach, and put it there.'
This pious act filled the mother 'with such a train of thought as I had never experienced before. I thought of the sweet mother of long ago who kept things in her heart,' etc. It is a bold comparison; however, unconscious profanations are about as common in the mouths of the lay membership of the new Church as are frank and open ones in the mouths of its consecrated chiefs.
Some days later, the family library--Christian Science books--was lying in a deep-seated window. It was another chance for the holy child to show off. He left his play and went there and pushed all the books to one side except the Annex. 'It he took in both hands, slowly raised it to his lips, then removed it carefully, and seated himself in the window.' It had seemed to the mother too wonderful to be true, that first time; but now she was convinced that 'neither imagination nor accident had anything to do with it.' Later, little Gordon let the author of his being see him do it. After that he did it frequently;probably every time anybody was looking. I would rather have that child than a chromo. If this tale has any object, it is to intimate that the inspired book was supernaturally able to convey a sense of its sacred and awful character to this innocent little creature without the intervention of outside aids. The magazine is not edited with high-priced discretion.
The editor has a claim, and he ought to get it treated.
Among other witnesses, there is one who had a 'jumping toothache,' which several times tempted her to 'believe that there was sensation in matter, but each time it was overcome by the power of Truth.' She would not allow the dentist to use cocaine, but sat there and let him punch and drill and split and crush the tool, and tear and slash its ulcerations, and pull out the nerve, and dig out fragments of bone; and she wouldn't once confess that it hurt. And to this day she thinks it didn't, and Ihave not a doubt that she is nine-tenths right, and that her Christian Science faith did her better service than she could have gotten out of cocaine.
There is an account of a boy who got broken all up into small bits by an accident, but said over the Scientific Statement of Being, or some of the other incantations, and got well and sound without having suffered any real pain and without the intrusion of a surgeon. I can believe this, because my own case was somewhat similar, as per my former article.
Also there is an account of the restoration to perfect health, in a single night, of a fatally injured horse, by the application of Christian Science. I can stand a good deal, but I recognise that the ice is getting thin here. That horse had as many as fifty claims: how could he demonstrate over them? Could he do the All-Good, Good-Good, Good-Gracious, Liver, Bones, Truth, All down but Nine, Set them up on the Other Alley? Could he intone the Scientific Statement of Being? Now, could he? Wouldn't it give him a relapse? Let us draw the line at horses. Horses and furniture.
There is a plenty of other testimonies in the magazine, but these quoted samples will answer. They show the kind of trade the Science is driving.
Now we come back to the question; Does it kill a patient here and there and now and then? We must concede it. Does it compensate for this? Iam persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that direction. For instance: when it lays its hands upon a soldier who has suffered thirty years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and mind, what is the actual sum of that achievement? This, I think: that it has restored to life a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful one. But for its interference that man would have essentially died thirty times more, in the three years which have since elapsed. There are thousand of young people in the land who are now ready to enter upon a life-long death similar to that man's. Every time the Science captures one of these and secures to him life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured disease, it may plausibly claim that in his person it has saved 300 lives. Meantime it will kill a man every now and then; but no matter, it will still be ahead on the credit side.
VIII
'We consciously declare that "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," was foretold as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in Revelation x. She is the "mighty angel," or God's highest thought to this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible in the "little book open" (verse 2). Thus we prove that Christian Science is the second coming of Christ--Truth--Spirit.' --Lecture by Dr. George Tomkins, D.D., C.S.
There you have it in plain speech. She is the mighty angel; she is the divinely and officially sent bearer of God's highest thought. For the present, she brings the Second Advent. We must expect that before she has been in her grave fifty years she will be regarded by her following as having been herself the Second Advent. She is already worshipped, and we must expect this feeling to spread territorially, and also to deepen in intensity [1].
